Sir James Mackintosh

Groups

James Mackintosh was a prominent Scottish Whig politician, a moral philosopher, and a historian of England. He belonged to the group of students that surrounded Dugald Stewart, professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh, during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. He was a regular writer for the publishing enterprises this group founded and edited, notably the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica; he contributed to the latter his “Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy, Chiefly During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” thereby completing a project begun by Dugald Stewart.